Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Not Applicable
Most amateur photographers have faced the situation where, lacking a very wide angle lens, the object that they wish to photograph is too big for their camera to capture in one photo.
One common and easy solution is to take several overlapping pictures and then when the photos are developed, mount them in an overlapping fashion into a montage which gives a more complete view of the object than any single picture. As can be easily imagined even if one has not experienced this directly, the resulting images are unlikely to fit together exactly. Indeed, there is a fundamental problem with perspective as the two-dimensional images of the object from the slightly different angles will not perfectly line up due to the expected distortions of perspective. But in spite of this technical limitation, this low budget technique works quite well because the viewers bring the visual experience necessary to mentally correct for the distortions. People are quite accustomed to looking at photographs and imagining the three dimensional objects and are remarkably sophisticated in intuitively understanding of the perspective shifts involved, so the montage works in spite of the perspective problems.
By way of definition, whenever montage is used here it is to refer to a montage in which the relative location of the pictures matters and where the goal is to capture a bigger object or space. It does not refer to the more commonly used type of montage also known as collages such as one of a family vacation in which pictures of the kids at the beach are perhaps trimmed out of a picture and pasted next to a picture of the hotel the family stayed at one night which is in turn partially covering a picture of a sunset over the lake. Nor does montage, as used here, refer to the type of montage done in a xe2x80x9cphotomosaicxe2x80x9d in which tiny unrelated pictures are used as tiles in the same way an artist dabs paint to create a larger but unrelated image.
Recent computer software such as Apple Computer""s QuickTime VR(trademark) (QTVR) attempts to interpolate multiple two dimensional images into a three dimensional interactive model. This approach has the advantage of a more realistic result. QTVR relieves people of the need to exercise the mental translation necessary in the case of the montage, but it does so at a price: the object""s representation is based on mathematical interpolation which may not always reflect the actual geometry of the object. People who to study the various images used to create the QTVR model might take away a better, fuller understanding of the object than people who view only the QTVR model.
Another alternative is to use a video or movie camera to capture the object. The camera roams around the object, capturing a movie which covers its entirety. Since a movie camera is simply taking a series of still images which are then played back in rapid succession, it is not a different way of capturing the object but rather just a different way of viewing the results. Instead of a montage, we look at a movie. Indeed, it is possible to print out photos of the individual frames of the movie and then arrange them into a montage. Initially this seems like a strange concept because one expects the movie to be more useful. Indeed, in some ways it is. The movie provides the opportunity for the camera to inject the observations of the photographer. As the camera pauses on details of particular interest, the photographer is pointing out to us the highlights. Artful control of the camera in the form of zooms and pans can also add to the usefulness of the presentation.
But, perhaps surprisingly, the montage can be a more useful result in some situations. More of the entire object or space can be seen at one time, and viewers can look at those details they are most interested in within the context of a more complete overall view. Instead of being trapped within the frame of the photographer""s vision, they can explore the object with their own agenda. Unless the goal of the viewing is to understand the vision of the photographer, as it often is in a fiction film for example, it can be argued that the montage provides a better interface for viewing the content.
Traditional paper-based montages suffer from a number of limitations. When two images overlap, only one of them can be seen. Since the images are likely to represent slightly different perspectives, no one image is necessarily superior to the others, but the traditional montage throws out the overlap. By flattening all the images into a two dimensional display, the perspectives of the photographs are not corrected for. Finally it would be difficult to automate construction of a traditional montage, and they are cumbersome to manipulate.
This invention is a method for viewing a two or three dimensional montage. By moving the montage into the electronic realm, a number of features become possible which were not possible with a paper montage. Unlike traditional montages, an electronic montage does not need to throw away the data when one image covers part of another, instead, the viewer can be allowed to dynamically choose the order in which the images are overlapped. In one such scheme the images are positioned based on the relative coordinates of their content (as in traditional montages) and then layered in order of the distance from the cursor to their center, with the ones closest on top. As the cursor moves over the montage, the order is changed and the images closest to the cursor float up to the cursor for full view. Controls for scrolling are added to allow the inspection of montages which are too large to fit within the viewing screen.
A traditional montage is usually a two-dimensional creation, but with a bit of imagination the basic concept can be extended into three dimensions. Suppose, for example, that the object to be studied is a chair. A number of still photographs are taken of.the chair from several sides and a number of angles. A three dimensional montage can then be created by taping the images together to create a model of the chair. One can imagine that with some cutting or folding or bending or clever suspensions with wire, the two-dimensional images might be connected into a three-dimensional form. Indeed, such a display might lend itself to interesting art since the medium would allow the artist to reveal elements in one view which are hidden in another.
In a software implementation, this invention (the xe2x80x9cDynamic Montage Viewerxe2x80x9d) has a number of advantages over the tape and wire contraption. First, it is not constrained by gravity. The images need not be taped together, but rather can just be projected onto a screen as if they were hanging in space where they should be. The viewer presents the images in their proper projections for their position in the three dimensional space they describe. Second, in a paper based three-dimensional montage, parts of some of the pictures are likely to be cut off or hidden in the folds and cuts. In the Dynamic Montage Viewer, the full images can float to the top as described above. An additional xe2x80x9cbring-to-centerxe2x80x9d control is added which allows the entire montage to be scrolled and rotated into position so that the topmost image is also centered and unaltered by perspective transformations.
Earlier, using single frames from a movie was described as a method of capturing images to be used in the montage. This is seen as a very efficient method of collecting data for the Dynamic Montage Viewer. However, when used in this manner, the temporal information in the movie is lost. For certain types of objects, such as a chair, this may not matter, since the images are not likely to change within the course of the movie. However, for other objects or spaces, the temporal information is also important because the object or space changes through time. Fortunately, it is easy to include temporal information in the dynamic montage viewer. Each of the images in any of the montages described above could just as easily be a movie taken by a stationary camera once that is mentally pictured, it is not difficult to relax the constraint that the cameras are stationary. The operator now sees the non-stationary images float around the screen through time. A xe2x80x9clockingxe2x80x9d feature is added to the xe2x80x9cbring-to-centerxe2x80x9d control to allow the operator to choose to start xe2x80x9ctrackingxe2x80x9d a movie so that it""s current frame stays full size while the other images and/or movies are reprojected behind it over time.
High-profile sporting events are tracked by a multitude of cameras. Presented in a dynamic montage, the user could choose a preferred angle and point of view dynamically rather than simply following the edits of the sports department. A dancer can be recorded from multiple angles by multiple movie cameras and the result assembled into a montage which can be viewed dynamically by dance students or dance lovers. A Dynamic Montage Viewer browser plug-in can give online auction shoppers a more complete understanding of the objects they are interested in. Virtual tours of historic or remote places and objects can be created as dynamic montages with image gathering equipment no more sophisticated than a camera. For montages which are not time-sensitive, coverage can be augmented by adding more images.
Like the paper-based montage, the Dynamic Montage Viewer demands that the operator mentally translate two dimensional projections into three dimensions and draw on real-world understanding and experience in interpreting the results. This is its obvious weakness and yet it is this that is perhaps its biggest strength. It allows users to interpret the unaltered image data for themselves and leverage all the knowledge and experience they bring with them to the viewer.